University of Virginia Library

XXXI. Distinguished Alumni—General

By the year 1861, time enough had passed for the
alumni, by their numbers, talents, and energies, to exercise
a perceptible influence upon the general progress of
the entire South. There was no department in the affairs
of that great community in which their beneficent
activities had not been displayed.

There were the lawyers, who, educated for their profession
by Lomax, Davis, Tucker, Minor, and Holcombe,

had carried to the bar, not only the knowledge
acquired through lectures and text-books, but also that
lofty view of its ethics and its duties which had been so
earnestly inculcated by those teachers. There were
the judges, who had administered the law in accord with
the principles which they had learned under the same
instructors. There were the statesmen who had drafted
the public ordinances under the transmitted influence of
that tutelage also. There were the journalists, who
had spread abroad political sentiments caught up from
the same source. There were the physicians, trained by
Dunglison, Emmet, Cabell, Magill, Howard, and Staige
Davis, who, pursuing their calling in town and village
and remote country districts, as a body never forgot
the lessons in professional conduct which their preceptors
had held up before them as equal in importance to
the services which they were to perform for the relief
of suffering. There were the teachers who, after being
thoroughly drilled in the academic branches by Harrison
and Gildersleeve, Holmes, George Tucker, and McGuffey
and their colleagues, had brought to the schools and
colleges of the South those advanced standards of scholarship
which had so long prevailed at the University of Virginia
and which, in turn, they were to employ so successfully
to enhance the public esteem for learning and
increase the dignity of their profession. There were
the ministers of the gospel, who, by their unselfish spirit
and militant piety combined, silently refuted the charge,
originating in ignorance and prejudice, that their alma
mater was indifferent to religion and morality. There
were the engineers who designed and built so many of
those public works, which, in our own times, have expanded
into systems of railway stretching from the
North Atlantic to the Gulf. There were the farmers
who, in the remote backwaters of the rural districts, so
often strove to improve the condition of agriculture,
and who, in so many instances, retained a relish for good
literature first acquired from the lips of revered professors.
And finally, there were the men of business, not
all of whom permitted the anxieties of the countinghouse
to divert their attention entirely from civic duties
or to dull completely their recollection of the lessons
which they had learned in the lecture-rooms of the University,
in the days of their far-off youth.

If that large band of matured alumni could have assembled,
at the same hour, under the roof of the stately
Rotunda, how many noble spirits, how many eloquent
tongues, what love of knowledge, what fidelity to principle,
what loyalty to honor, what devotion to country,
what splendid, what solid, performance in every sphere
of action, would have been represented among their
thoughtful figures! As their shadows pass before us
fifty-eight years after the close of that period in our
history to which they belonged in life, we prefer to think
of them only in association with those remote academic
years, when they were the care-free and buoyant citizens
of the arcades, the eager competitors for the prizes
of the lecture-room and the plaudits of the debating society;
the devotees at the unselfish shrine of college
friendship; and still crowned with the romance of their
youthful hopes and aspirations.